You're not missing anything, it is a giant scam.

Your money is going to the profits if the shareholders of your health insurance company.

The only part of the US economy that is actually growing substantially in terms of workforce... is the healthcare sector.

And that's not mostly doctors and nurses.

It's mostly paper pushers.

There are so many healthcare paper pushers now, that if you actually waved a magic wand and implemented a single payer system with much more sane pricing for everyone and a less bloated set of paper pushers... something like a million or two million peoole would lose their jobs.

This country is fucked.

Everyone trying to explain to you how the concept of insurance works is giving you a needlessly complex explanation.

There are many countries that have public health care that works better and costs less, some that even have private insurance options that are no where near as insanely price gauging as the US system.

Our system is a giant, legal, fraud/scam, that intentionally makes things as expensive as they possibly can be, and delivers as little service as it possibly can, all that corporate c suite and shareholders can quite profit off of your misery.